Electronic Gaming

It is a testament to miniaturization that we can now fit an entire entertainment system onto devices no larger than flash drives. Streaming dongles plug into your HDTV’s HDMI port and play content over WiFi. Dongles offer some great entertainment options for those on or off a budget.

Candy Crush Saga, the tile-matching clone of the classic game Bejeweled, is the most popular “free” game on Android and iOS. As a hardcore mobile gamer, I'm here to tell you there are far better alternatives to Candy Crush with deeper gameplay, better graphics, and, in a few cases, actual game narratives.

Last Update: December 7, 2013: Browse through games by genre—there is something for every gaming taste on this list. This newly-updated list also includes links to the Android versions through Amazon (as available) as well as Google Play so that Kindle Fire users can get their game on as well. Users of plain Android devices (i.e. not the Kindle Fire or Nook HD) should download the Amazon app store onto their devices and browse the offerings since Amazon frequently offers discounted prices on Android apps. Tech Answers will be updating this list regularly, so check back often and happy gaming!

A few months back I wrote a blog post, The Best Cross-Platform Mobile Games, detailing the best of mobile games for both Android smartphones and tablets as well as the iPhone and iPad. In that post I noted that there are many excellent games that are, for the most part, exclusive to the iPhone and iPad. It was the iPhone, after all, that demonstrated just how much potential mobile games have and practically every mobile game studio publishes first to Apple devices before even considering Android, if they ever make it to Android at all. These are, in my book, among the best such mobile games.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Isn’t that how an article about derivative works is supposed to begin? We only ask because there are probably other articles out there on this topic that begin the same way. Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, 100% true originality in the case of media like books, film, music and games is practically unheard of. That’s not a bad thing; works that build on one another can be some of the richest experiences imaginable. On the other hand, some people are just lazy and rip-off other, greater works.

Free. Everybody likes free. I mean, what’s not to like about free? It’s free! Free, free, free - use the word often enough, however, and it begins to lose its meaning. “Free special offer (some rules and restrictions apply)!” “Free entree (with purchase of equal or greater value entree)!” “Free ski trip (after we badger you into investing in a timeshare over the course of an eight-hour 'seminar')!” Free just isn’t what it used to be, and nowhere is this more evident than the world of electronic games. Users are steeped in phrases like “free-to-play” and “freemium” to a degree that free really does start to sound like a four-letter-word. Free they say? Nonsense, we say. Let’s take a look.